Vulnerability

In the most simplistic terms, vulnerability is the state of openness to the experience of being hurt.  The hurt may be physical, emotional, or both. Some individuals who have experienced physical or emotional hurt have developed protective shields, calluses, if you will, or a warning system that keeps them from reengaging the same experience that produced the original pain.

Many times the individual callus is a detachment from personal relationships or an extreme work ethic that consciously or unconsciously screens out the necessary responses and reactions so often associated with deep personal relationships.  Such individuals can provide an excellent armature of personality about which to wrap personality traits for characters in story.  The reader, upon recognizing such a character, will expect that person to be thrust into a circumstance that forces the character back into the fear of hurt.  The writer is in on the conspiracy, recognizing a good dramatic situation when it is presented.

How profitable is it then for a writer to begin compiling a personal list of vulnerabilities?  Your contribution to the conversation is the belief that the profitability rate of return is high.  Where to begin, then, as a tentative, toe-in-the-water approach to considering your own vulnerability index, more or less in a small, desktop Moleskine notebook, close at hand when new characters are being cast in a new story?

Begin with a list of characters memorable to you, men, and women of all ages who have experienced such emotional hurts as loss, abandonment, extreme consequences from acting out anger, unrequited love, smothering love, the suffocation of control freaks, and multitudes of humiliations, real and imagined in the home, school, and workplace.

These ought to get you going because, you argue, you became aware of these individuals and identified with them in the first place because of your own vulnerabilities or—and this is significant—your fears of vulnerabilities regarding situations and circumstances you were on the cusp of entering yourself.

You believe the creative individual needs awareness of personal vulnerability in order to be open to it, which is probably a more poorly organized way of saying you wish to remain open to as much as possible in the way of experience and thoughts outside your present orbit.  Some of these moments of openness may cause you emotions of discomfort or disorientation or downright pain and regret, but the potential benefits of going forth without calluses or body armor or emotional detachment seem worth the risk in terms of things experienced in fuller fashion.  The risks:  you may get a crush on someone who does not reciprocate.  You might take that one or more steps beyond to the shores of lust and desires for connection.  You frequently get crushes on ideas.  You often spend considerable time wooing an idea, thinking you’ve a relationship going, when it decides you’ve begun taking it for granted.  Or perhaps you’ve spent considerable time on something you find satisfying and no one else does.  Your vulnerability has been tested.  But in a better sense, you have developed calluses and defenses that allow you to the plateau of risk, the sandbox where the big kids get to play with their feelings and ideas.

For some reasons, when you were seven, you had the seven-year-old equivalent of a crush on a girl named Georgia, who was in the sixth grade, taller than you, and in possession of what you then considered unbeatable athletic activities.  For as long as you can remember, you challenged her to a game of tetherball.  Once or twice you were able to score a point, but more often than not, she beat you with a kind of mechanical grace that intrigued and impressed you to the point where, every day, when you saw her, you challenged her to a game.  The thing you see now in the retrospect of the decades is that she never so much as patronized you with a sigh or even questioned why you were so intent on being humiliated by the results.  You cannot recall so much as the briefest of conversations with you; it was always you, bringing the challenge to her and her striding to the tetherball pole, nodding at you to serve, then engaging.

In many ways, that is your first conscious memory of vulnerability.  Of course there were others, and more to come.  There is no thought of stopping now; the more you stand forth vulnerable, the more you will be able so stand again, at another time, in another circumstance, another situation, whether it is love, a new story, a new idea, abandoning some standard you once thought remarkable for its strength, parting from a loved one through death or disagreement or even the gradual sense of disinterest.

You cannot be in love or in friendship (which is surely love) or in a story or a classroom without allowing yourself the great luxury of being vulnerable.  It is unthinkable to hold back, and when you find yourself doing so, you realize you are turning away from risk, turning, as it were, away from the sight of Georgia, appearing in the schoolyard, in all ways unapproachable except for a game of tetherball.

Story Is

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
Joan Didion

Story is in many ways the equivalent of ordering a bookshelf from Amazon.  You have ordered it in the first place because you have enough books to fill it.  In fact, thinking about it, you may have underestimated the number of books now on the floor or tables or the shelves in the bathroom and will need to order yet another.

Story is the equivalent of the bookshelf arriving from Amazon and the subsequent discovery that the “some assembly required” description is more than a little hyperbole.

Story is setting the respective pieces in some area, then attempting to decipher the instructions.

Story is the discovery that the individual who wrote the assembly instructions hates writing.

Story is finishing the assembly with one or more surplus screws, causing you to wonder if the individual who boxed the shelf were an individual who hates readers or if perhaps you’d missed some vital step in the assembly process.

Story is having a shelf that wobbles.

Story is the discovery that while assembling the shelf, you either taught yourself Anglo-Saxon or had access to a rich treasure of profanity you had not realized you owned.

Story is the discovery that your shelf has caused you to invoke the pathetic fallacy wherein you implied that the shelf had a mother.

Story is the realization that you will, the next time you purchase a shelf, visit a store that sells pre-assembled shelves or provides a service in which some individual, usually a man wearing glasses and a duck-billed cap will assemble the shelf, all the while making sarcastic remarks about how busy you must be.

Story is the awareness that you do not assemble shelves; you assemble scenes that neither wobble nor leave extra screws.

Story is the awareness that you are capable of far more spectacular failures than mere wobbly shelves from Amazon dot com, that things far more significant than bookshelves have failed you, not merely because of your difficulty with the instructions but also because of your difficulty with wrenches, screw drivers, angle irons, and drills, your ineptitude with thematic material and motivation.

Story is the awareness that most individuals who in successful fashion assemble bookshelves have better engagement with their senses of temper and frustration than you do.

Story is the awareness that even though it is about your characters rather than you, a wobbly story nevertheless reflects on you.

Story is the awareness that you have attempted to control outcomes, which, because they are images of reality, are as difficult to control as the events in reality are difficult to control.

Story is the awareness that, as you need some shelving for your books, you need some construction to hold your inventions, and further that these constructions are every as liable to wobble as the bookshelves you assemble.

Story is the awareness that men who wear glasses and duck-billed caps and who probably hate readers are nevertheless necessary adjuncts, for reasons you may never understand.

Story is awareness.  When all else is said and done, story is awareness, adjuncts to process, for reasons you may never understand.

Illusion

Illusions seem to make sense when they appear or are brought to mind; they often project an aura of an idealized atmosphere in which success, if not love, conquers all; dreams and hopes come to fruition.  The rent somehow will be paid because, the illusion tells us, right action produces desired results.

The entire universe, illusion whispers in our ear, is an interlinked network of cooperative cause and reward-oriented effect.  We may not be paid in the coin we visualize in our separate illusions, but we will be paid in some coin because for every action, there is a reaction, equal in force and opposite in direction, right?

How ever fraught the universe may appear to us in the more practical terms under which predators lurk in anticipation of supper or unseen dangers and fatal surprises must surely await, some small part of us still grows the avocado pit in a flowerpot, nourishes in some way or other an illusion that some small part of all will someday, somehow be well.

You give up some illusions each time you begin a new project, each time you fall in love, each time you are asked to prepare a resume or curriculum vitae.  Illusions are neither all positive nor by any means all negative.  The ease in which an illusion with potentially harmful effects may be surrendered is equal to the force necessary to let go of an illusion built on a moral high ground or platform of unending cheer.

Is it an illusion for us to imagine we have given up the illusions of our more callow years?  Is it an illusion for us to believe we have substituted common sense, whatever that may be, for illusion?

Some of the Eastern philosophies have gone far along the track of objectifying illusion, even to the point of giving it a name:  Maya.

Vanity of vanities, one prophet says, all is vanity.

It is possible, isn’t it, to substitute illusion for vanity?  Maybe vanity is illusion, or illusion vanity.

Some of the same Eastern philosophies that have named illusion Maya take matters to the extreme position of saying there is only one reality, that being the godhead.  Everything else, they argue, is Maya.

In some cultures, the individual who falls in love with anything but the godhead is regarded as a fool.  Yet other cultures regard the individual who does not fall in love as a fool.

Is being foolish all that bad?  You are not a reliable source to venture opinion on that because of your perception that foolishness is your default position.  Of course, foolishness may be an illusion, but if it is, then there is likelihood that its polar opposite may also be an illusion.  Indeed, all judgment maybe an illusion, leaving the possibility that the only non-illusory things are those that can withstand the rigor of scientific observation, evaluation, and demand for proof.

Two parallel lines have been hypothecated to meet only in infinity.

Can the same be said of illusion and foolishness?

Why?

If someone says of you that you look different, is that a complement, an accusation, or an illusion.

You do know this:  it is more difficult to write something in actuality than to imagine having written it, and that observation is no illusion.

You are also aware of the illusory nature attached to something you have actually written that strikes you as being good beyond the ordinary degree to which things you have written seem good.

Why do the words “seem” and “appear” fill you with suspicion when you see or hear them?

The Gorilla on the Bridge

When you first encountered the scene, you were stunned by its implications to the point of not being able to process it farther; you could not translate its significance as a tool in your own writing and your understanding of the writing of others.  Your circuitry shut it out of you memory, pushing it away as though it were a dream with meanings and implications too fraught to allow inside.

The venue where you saw it is forgotten as well, one of the small, pinched neighborhood theaters with sprung, uncomfortable seats on the mom-and-dad-store fringes of Hollywood, where classics and historical treasures appeared as if by whim between undistinguished double bills, where the ticket takers wore shabby blue suits while trying to accommodate unruly mustaches.

You’d been a fan of Laurel and Hardy at the time, doubtless a reason why you went on that particular night.  When you had concerns about how you could presume to manage any sort of career relative to writing, Laurel and Hardy films injected a sense of purpose.  You were appreciative of the inevitable pace their narratives rode to the splendid moment of combustion, eruption, and some final outrage of a spectacular disintegration that began with the expression on Oliver Hardy’s face.  This particular scene, the one you could not at the time process, was one of the more sublime examples of cosmic chaos.

Some years later, as you read through a series of essays by James Agee, most likely Agee on Film, you came across a sentence that allowed you at last to process what you’d seen in actual words rather than visual images/

The scene—really more of a moment within a scene—featured Laurel and Hardy as piano movers.  They are maneuvering a piano over a rope bridge, strung precariously over a gaping chasm.  “Midway across,” Agee writes, “they meet a gorilla.”

You may have read the entire collection of Agee essays.  You may also have not done so.  What you did do, and what you now wish you had in your hands, are the manuscript pages you embarked upon.  You called it The Gorilla on the Bridge.  Those were remarkable days in your young life; you frequently wrote as though on the manic cycle of what was then referred to as manic-depressive syndrome.  You learned a good deal from your writing during that time of your life, but you had not yet learned how to drive through to the finish, to stay with the project, in metaphor abandoning projects as the subsequent gorilla arrived on the bridge.

Perhaps it is well you do not have the pages, perhaps the time elapsed since their birth has meant something approximating growth in your abilities.  To add to all these perhaps tropes, perhaps these lines represent an opportunity to reconstruct not merely a story but rather the evolution of the sense of what a story is.  You’d have been sure to have notions then of what the gorilla represented, even to the point of a well-justified explanation for what it was doing on that bridge in that particular moment.  One thing you have learned—in some measure from Moby-Dick—is that it is possible to tell readers too much about whales to the point where they begin rooting for Ahab. This realization could well become the driving force; the gorilla as protagonist.

Literature is filled with Leviathans, mocha-colored whales, gargantuan sorts, King Kong sorts.  With due respect to the original King Kong, he would not think to venture onto so spindly and restive a bridge; he had his eyes on, shall we say, other matters.

Things to keep this notion and image alive:  Where was the gorilla going? Whence had he come?  What was on his mind?  Why should we care about him?

Imagine his frustration at seeing a roly-poly man in a bowler hat and a virtual scarecrow of a man, exerting themselves with, of all things, a piano.  Imagine him, having to explain to his mate why he was late coming home.

The bridge itself is a remarkable metaphor for life, causing you to wonder if that seriously neglected Thornton Wilder had at one point in his life seen the Laurel and Hardy film.  What effect might it have contributed to The Bridge of San Luis Rey?

We think we have answers up our sleeves when we set forth to dramatize some existential nightmare.  Filled with confidence, we pile on the weal and woe to the point where the moment of pure dramatic impasse is reached, then we—at least you—marvel at our gorilla, then pause, our message and its supportive metaphor looms glorious in opposition.

Then we pause, waiting for an answer, congratulating ourselves for the gorillas, our attention focused squarely in that unique landscape of challenge.

Narrative Voice

If we’re to get the most benefit from our reading of a particular narrative, we’re well advised to spend time wondering who the narrator is, and what he or she had in mind for us—at the outset and the conclusion.

Were we being seduced into the belief we were about to share some romantic idyll, only to Improvised Explosive Device of social consciousness or moral inquiry thrust upon us as an onion peeled before our eyes?

We can begin our reading-examination by questioning the author, moving him or her into the interview room, then asking straight away: Why did you chose this particular character or group of characters to narrate your story?

This is a reasonable question to ask.  If, for instance, we were able to pin down Herman Melville about why, of the voluminous and remarkable dramatis personae he chose to narrate the events of Moby-Dick, he opted for Ishmael, he’d be able to look at us with slight askance as he explained how Ishmael had to be the narrator because he was the sole survivor in the contest between the whale and the obdurate Ahab.  

Melville’s answer—any author’s answer—is still to be ingested with a grain or two of salt or in liquid form as the salt of some grain.  Authors do not have to tell the truth nor to be cooperative or, even more confounding, may be an habitual liar.  The author may have been at pains to build a particular persona such as Somerset Maugham did, conveying one personality while being quite another in day-to-day, non-writing life.

In most cases, readers are left to evaluate what they read on circumstantial rather then direct evidence.

Excellent starting points for reader evaluation are two seminal works from Samuel Langhorn Clemens, Innocents Abroad, and Life on the Mississippi, each sent into the world as autobiographical excursions, each combining fact with a great deal of opinion, both direct and implied.  Writing as his self-proclaimed persona of Mark Twain, Clemens approaches each work with his signature deadpan narrative voice.  Do we trust him?  He goes on as though he expects us to—and we do until we sense our reader’s leg is being pulled along with the attitudinal leg of actual individuals in the text.  Thus Twain shows us a major device, the potential for alternate visions of the same reality.  Twain was by no means the first to do so, nor was he the first to feign ignorance of what he was doing.  Using these techniques, he rode into the twentieth century on a wave of irony.  A century later, he—and we—are still riding.

Do we take Mark Twain as reliable?

In England, a remarkable novelist, a mere five years Twain’s junior, was born.  Twain lasted until 1910.  Thomas Hardy remained until 1928.  Twain’s work informed the twentieth century.  Thomas Hardy’s monumental opera dragged the nineteenth century kicking and screaming into the twentieth.  Which of the two do we consider reliable?  Why?  Hint:  the answer has the word humor in it.

Do we consider any narrator entirely reliable?  Given our knowledge of Truman Capote’s troubled personal life, are we able to take him at his narrative word or is there always the acerbic hint of agenda clinging to it.  And yet.  Capote surely read George Orwell, particularly Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, his first booklength venture, written in such a way that we become absolutely convinced of his accurate, documentary style.  Because of its narrative tone, its judicious, almost frugal use of personal pronouns or references, its seeming objectivity, Orwell’s account is still in print, still seen as a model of a particular type of memoir.  Compare Orwell’s approach in Down and Out with Capote’s twentieth-century narrative breakthrough, In Cold Blood.  Read Capote’s Hand-Carved Coffins and Music for Chameleons, then ask yourself the question Capote was prompting you to ask all along:  Are these two works factual reporting or fiction?  Then ask yourself why he was at such pains to blur the two states.

An earlier account by the same sections of London described by Orwell, The People of the Abyss by Jack London, takes narrative tones ranging from self-piteous to hectoring, and political posturing.  Try finding a copy of The People of the Abyss in most libraries, much less in bookstores.  Amazon or Alibris are the more likely sources and their selections are limited.

A valuable point emerges here:  The ease and fluidity of an author’s narrative style can lull us into an unwary state wherein we glide over the things we might ordinarily regard with some suspicion.  Authors such as Twain and Orwell, later Joan Didion, can inject the occasional adjective of judgment with such deftness that we swallow it whole, taking it in, scarcely recognizing how we’ve been led along the pathway of their intent, cajoled and teased into the emotional response the writer wishes to convey.  We are being led along the narrative trail by the process of evocation rather than mere description.

Same thing works in photography.  A photographer has perhaps photographed the same building in differing conditions of light, choosing the one exposure that most expresses her desired effect.

Even when we read for pure information, as opposed to such adjuncts as enjoyment or disagreement or traces of bias, we cannot avoid the need to ask questions, to challenge the statements, to engage authors dead these long years with questions.  How do you know?  What did you feel?  Are you fucking kidding me?

Books Everywhere

Many of your friends with various versions of e-readers are enthusiastic about the variety and number of titles they have already downloaded—still have to work at being comfortable with that word—and are as likely to brag about the length of time necessary to perform such an operation as they once were relative to their successes with romantic interests.

In a gesture of housekeeping, you removed several “aps” or applications from your iPhone on the grounds that you have never used them or rarely used them.  You forbore to delete “aps” that allow you to download—that word again—books.  Out of curiosity, you checked to see how many downloaded books you have on your various appliances (which are not really all that various).  You were able to find a download of Jane Austen’s novel, Possessions, which you mean to reread for purposes beyond mere enjoyment, even though the purposes are on vacation from your memory at this moment.

On the other hand, there are now three books of the bound sort on your work table as you compose here, four if you’d care to include the Moleskine notebook you sometimes carry with you when you are not carrying the two smaller notebooks which you also sometimes carry with you, the “sometimes” in the equation being a matter of whim and mystery.  (Why are you motivated to take the red Moleskine on certain days and not on others?)

When you were faced with the necessity of moving from Hot Springs Road to this amusing-in-its-analog-to-Inner-City at Sola Street, you’d arbitrarily decided to take only a hundred books, a number that expanded immediately when you thought to cull your collection of short story collections.  That was a tad over a year ago.

It was once possible to move about here at Sola Street without tripping over piles of books or toppling stacks of them.  Such luxuries have vanished; each day causes you to acquire some new book or other, each for various reasons, not the least of which are the ARCs, the advance reading copies sent you by publishers in hopes of a review that will generate sales momentum.

Today, a Sunday, would seem to have provided some respite since there are no deliveries of mail, FedEx, or United Parcel, nevertheless there you were at Chaucer’s with the specific goal in mind of acquiring Gogol’s Dead Souls, which arrived in your mind as an excellent adjunct to your teaching of Joseph Heller’s iconic Catch-22.  It is true that you could have downloaded (no way are you going to get used to that word; it sounds—as ENK would say—gross) Dead Souls, more than likely at a lesser cost than you paid for the Penguin edition, but you’d have then had to store it in some sort of system that would in effect be your compromise between the Dewey Decimal System and the Library of Congress System, which you might have been able to do, but would you have been able to retrieve it with the ease of its downloading?  And would you be as likely to reread it in digital form, as you are likely to reread it in its print version?  You understand perfectly well what a generational thing this is.

One of your dearest friends, who has written well over thirty books, is not computer literate and although you have written well over thirty books on typewriters before writing yet others on computers, you are at least of junior high school level in your computer skills.  You have even edited books on computers, without ever having seen the paper manuscript (if in fact there ever was one).

In some ways, your approach to paper publishing reminds you of the aftermath of serious parties in which much is consumed and participants “fall asleep” on various sofas, beds, chairs, floors, and the like.  You see the convivial survivors on your clean-up rounds.  You see books, strewn about the relative smallness that is 409 East Sola Street in much the same way, set about the areas you tend to gravitate to in one reading mode or another, dog-eared, bookmarked, or somehow festooned with slips of paper, index cards, or Post-it Notes.

You understand perfectly well that you could experience the same results with e-books, allowing you space at 409 for such things as flowers, plants, small ceramics, and photographs, but again the matter of electronic filing and storage enters the picture joined at the hip with neatness.

Perhaps the issue is not even as much related to neatness as it is to rowdy parties, spontaneity, and mischief.  Perhaps writing, editing, teaching, and, in fact, reading, are better accomplished when they are indulged in a party-like atmosphere of conviviality, argument, the occasional harsh word and/or misunderstanding.

One of the books on your desk is Arthur Koestler’s The Case of the Midwife Toad, which came to you in a discussion with a biologist, lingering with the tantalizing awareness that your next book review is to be an oldie.  Even while you were having the discussion with the biologist, the opening lines of the review presented themselves to you.

The Koestler rests directly atop D.H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature, which you intend to use in your Spring quarter class at UCSB, along with the small volume not far removed in size from the red Moleskine, Harry Frankfurt’s remarkable On Bullshit, which you also thought to bring to the university in honor of your earnest belief that Professor Frankfurt’s work has even greater relevance at a university than in the sclerotic streets of the inner city.

What it comes down to, your own belief of the inevitability of the wider universe for electronic books notwithstanding, is the sense of the print book being more convivial, more likely to provoke responses and reactions beyond its text.

Matters of Taste and Chemistry

As you watch the results of political polls on two of your favorite political blogs, Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo, and Andrew Sullivan’s The Daily Dish, you see graphs representing the popularity of various politicians in relationship to one another and, of course, as a numerical display of individual position in the favor or disfavor of some demographic.

These graphs remind you of your own experiences as a reader, as a participant in the great romantic landscape, and as an individual trying to make some sense of himself and the landscape in which he lives.

Over your years as a reader, you have become invested in individuals with whom you have little in common other than such obvious things as being human, perhaps—but not necessarily—because you have the same gender or politics or literary tastes or jobs or approximations of religious philosophy or background.  You have had what you consider to be amazing romantic connections among a wide demographic of age, background, and ethnicity.  Your enduring friendships have come from sources that have surprised you. 

Your range of associations with dogs is the least surprising in the sense of you having always preferred a working breed, either herding or hounding.

The range of tastes you experience in the areas of reading and romance confound you the most in the sense of you being drawn to some predictable avenues but many more unpredictable ones.  What, for instance, could you have had at first encounter with Sir Wilfrid of Ivanhoe?  What could you have found so compelling about Jane Austen?  For all your fondness for the mystery genre, what could possible have driven you to read with some persistence the novels in the Ellery Queen series? 

You can readily understand the attraction you shared with M. and L., but what was it about C. or R. that proved so distracting and engaging?  J. made perfect sense; JMD was on track to being the love of your life.  And the crushes, reminding you as they did of the times when, as a boy growing up in Los Angeles, you stood in the Curry Ice Cream Parlors, (homes of the Mile-High cake cone), deliberating over flavors, repeating the magic and romance of their names:  pistachio, French vanilla, chocolate, strawberry, grenadine, peach.

What are the chemistries influencing taste in reading, romance, friendship, profession, philosophy?  Why is it necessary to have preferences?  What draws you to a person or thing?  What draws them to you?  With your scant understanding of how the process begins to work among insects, you can extrapolate, understanding as you do a bird, for instance, being drawn to a particular tree because that tree serves as a home to relevant insects and possible seeds or sap or some other delectable.

Do your romantic interests remind you of actual persons or types?  Do you have some intuitive process you have not articulated even though it operates to inform you that here is a person whose own individual chemistry is compatible with yours?  You and VMY used to speculate that you had vast reserves of things in common, but in fact you had few.

How is it that even at this advanced stage of your life, there are those before whom you are inexplicably tongue-tied and yet others for whom you are, even as you speak, thinking of yourself as a silver-tongued devil for whom inventiveness is ever ready to explode?

Somewhere along the way of your growing up, your older sister took you in hand by marching you to the front desk of the main library in Providence, Rhode Island, where she directed your sign-up for a library card.  A few years later, she took you in hand, teaching you a basic fox trot step which, she suggested, would make you less a liability as you sought to enter the world of girls, holding hands, walking home from school, passing notes. You need a line of conversation, she advised, something beyond sports and cars, something intriguing, and not those bubble gum cards with pictures of baseball players. 

After some consideration, you thought you had such an approach, something well beyond the outrageous joke approach you’d been made aware of.  You even tried it out on your sister and her friends, all of whom seemed to think this conversational gambit would get you some positive notice.

You can still visualize your object of affection and your anticipation of the avenues of conversation this opening gambit would invite.  Her name was J.  Her hair, a short, curly blonde, framed a thin, oval of a face that spoke to you of companionable empathy. You’d watched her speculatively for months, agonizing over a suitable opening.  Approaching her in the hallway one afternoon, you greeted her, then ventured, “I have the word that describes you.”

J. regarded you for a long moment in which you were certain she was searching for the perfect response that would set the conversation along a comfortable path.  “What’s your name?”  she asked.  As you feared, she was unaware you’d existed until this moment.  You told her.

“What do your friends call you?”

“Shelly,” you said.

 “Okay.  Fuck you, Shelly.”

It was a clean, direct riposte.  You never again told anyone you had the word that described them, an approach you still think was woefully under appreciated.  You do not wonder much about that.  Instead, you wonder about the chemistry that caused your heart to flutter at the sight of her and the fact that after all these years, you still remember her middle name.